The General of the Dead Army (5 page)

Then, when lunch was over, he would go through into the drawing-room and one by one the visitors would put their cases before him. How little the stories differed! The things they said to him had soon become so familiar that each day seemed like no more than a reliving of the previous day in his mind. Often there were women whose grief over their lost sons or husbands was such that they could not restrain their sobs, and that made the general even more on edge than ever.

“Now that’s enough of that!” he cried one day to one of these weeping women. “This is not the place to bring your tears! Your son fell on the field of battle, fighting for his country.”

Another day there was a tall man who had scarcely entered the room before shouting:

“This mission of yours is nothing but a hoax!”

The general turned white with anger. “That is traitor’s talk! Get out of here!”

Towards the middle of this last week, among the visitors waiting for him he noticed a very old woman accompanied by a little girl. The old woman looked as though she was in a state of exhaustion, so he went over to her first.

“My son is still over there,” she said in a faint voice, “my only son.”

And taking a little bag out of her pocket she pulled it open with trembling hands. It contained a telegram, yellowed with age, which she held out to him. His eyes flicked through the usual phrases employed by commanding officers to convey the news of a soldier’s death to his relatives, but stopped abruptly at the words: “ … fell on the field of battle at Stalingrad.”

He tried to explain to her: “I’m very sorry, my dear, but it’s not Russia I’m going to, it’s Albania.” The old woman rested her dulled eyes on him for a moment, but apparently without having grasped the meaning of what he said.

“There is something I want to ask you to do,” she went on.

“Could you manage to find out where he died, and how? And who was with him, who brought him water, and what his last wishes were?”

The general attempted once more to make her understand that he wasn’t going to Russia, but the old woman, still unable to understand, simply went on repeating her request while all the other occupants of the room eyed one another in silence.

“Set your mind at rest, my dear lady,” someone gently interrupted at last, “the general will do everything he can to help, you may be sure.” And at that the old woman thanked him and left, bent almost double, supporting herself with one hand clutching her stick and the other on the shoulder of the little girl beside her.

Another afternoon, two days later, a man with a particularly sombre look about him waited till everyone else had gone.

“I was a general once too,” he said in a tone that betrayed suppressed anger, “and I took part in the Albanian campaign.” The two men looked at one another for an instant with mutual contempt, the one because he was looking at a defeated general, the other because he was dealing with a mere peacetime soldier.

“What is it you want?” the general asked his visitor.

“Nothing at all, really Because I’m not expecting you to get very far anyway. To tell you the truth I have no confidence in you, and also I find this whole scheme basically ridiculous. But given that you’ve taken it on, this mission, well it might as well be done properly, damn it!”

“Could you explain yourself more clearly?”

“I have nothing more to say. I simply wanted to warn you. Be always on your guard. Keep your head high, and never let them see you bow it. They will try to provoke you, they may try to make a fool of you, and you must know how to answer them. You must be on the alert all the time. They will try to insult our soldiers’ remains. I know them too well. They often jeered at us. They didn’t give a damn even then! Imagine what they will be capable of now!”

“I shall not tolerate such behaviour under any circumstances,”

the general said. The ex-general looked at him with an air of commiseration, as though he was just on the point of saying: “Poor fellow!,” then he suddenly turned and walked out without even taking his leave. For the next three days, the last before he was due to leave, the general’s drawing-room was packed with people the whole time, and the general himself, worn out by these preliminaries, longed only to leave as soon as possible. Meanwhile, his wife had become extremely nervous and agitated. One evening, as they lay side by side talking, she told him what was really on her mind:

“Why can’t you just refuse to go on this mission? I feel… I feel as though death has come into the house.”

He soothed her as best he could. But that night he scarcely slept a wink himself. He had the feeling that he was going into battle next day.

He received the last visitor of all on the very morning of his departure. He was up just after daybreak, because he had to be at the airport very early. As he went out through the garden to open the garage doors he noticed figures outside. They were squatting down asleep against the railings, wrapped in a thick blanket - an old man and his young grandson. They had come from one of the most distant frontier districts. The journey had taken them several days and they had only arrived on the last train the night before. Since they hadn’t dared to ring the bell at such an hour they had simply huddled down on the pavement outside and dozed off while waiting for the dawn.

The general repeated for the last time the words he had uttered so often: “The lists have been drawn up with the utmost care, don’t worry, we shall find them.” The old countryman thanked him with a nod of the head, then bent to pick up the blanket that he and his grandson had let fall at their feet when startled into wakefulness by the squeaking garage door.

That is how it had been, and that was how the general’s two weeks at home, before he left for Albania, had been spent.

T
HEY WERE ON THE ROAD AGAIN
. There was a fine rain falling. For weeks now they had been journeying through rugged country with only scattered villages. The car drove in front. The lorry carrying the workmen and their tools brought up the rear. The road was a very busy one. Villagers, dressed in their tightly fitting suits of thick black wool, were passing continually in both directions, on foot, on horseback, or perched on the backs of lorries. The general observed the lie and contours of the hills they passed with great interest. He tried to envisage the tactics that would have been adopted by successive armies during all the country’s various wars.

Not far from the centre of one small town there was a newspaper kiosk. There were quite a number of people crowding around it, others were standing nearby reading, and some were glancing through their newspapers as they walked away.

“The Albanians read a great many newspapers,” the general commented suddenly.

The priest emerged from his torpor in the other corner.

“That’s because they are so politically conscious. Now they’ve quarrelled with the Soviet Union they are completely isolated in Europe.”

“As they always have been.”

“But now they’re under blockade. And with things as they are it’s going to be hard for them to hold out.”

“All the same, having to blockade so small a country…”

“It’s odd!”

“Exactly. They’ll be hard put to hold out, in the circumstances.”

“It just shows what stubborn devils they must be,” the general said. “It looks as though it’s impossible to subdue them by force. Perhaps they would succumb to beauty?”

The priest laughed.

“What are you laughing at?”

The priest continued to chuckle without answering.

The general looked out at the dark landscape swathed in mist, at the denuded flanks of the mountains and the multitude of stones of all sizes scattered everywhere over the ground. He felt a profound sadness well up in him. It was a week now since they had seen any other sight but rock-covered slopes just like these, and he began to feel that beneath their stark wildness they were concealing some awful secret.

“It is a tragic country,” he said. “Even their clothes have something tragic about them. Look at those black cloaks, and the women’s skirts.”

“What would you say if you heard their songs, I wonder? They are even more lugubrious. It is all tied up with the country’s whole past. Down the centuries, there can be no people that has experienced a sadder destiny. That is what accounts for the roughness, the harshness we see today.”

The car was making its way down a mountain road. It was cold. Every now and then they heard the sound of lorries furiously revving their engines. At the top of a slope there rose the outline of a big factory still in the course of construction. Because of the bareness of the landscape the half-finished building stood out gaunt and gigantic against its backdrop of mist.

“It’s a copper-processing plant,” the priest said.

Every now and then, when they came to crossroads, they would pass square, or circular, or hexagonal blockhouses with gun-slits pointing down at the road. At each bend the car emerged into their line of fire, and the general sat staring back into those narrow, deserted slits with the rain dripping endlessly across them.

We’re past! he would say to himself every time the car passed out of the line of fire. But then at the next turn yet another blockhouse would seem to rise up out of the earth, and the car seemed once more threatened by its potential fire. The general let his eyes relax and focus on the rain streaming down the car window; but every now and then, as he began to sink into a doze, he imagined the car windows shattered into a thousand shards by bullets, and he would wake up again with a sudden start. But the blockhouses were all silent and deserted. If you studied them carefully from a distance they looked like Egyptian sculptures, with expressions that were sometimes cold and contemptuous, sometimes enigmatic, depending upon the design of the gunslits. When the slits were vertical then the little forts had a cruel, menacing expression that conjured up some evil spirit; but when the slits were horizontal, then their strange petrified mimicry expressed only indifference and scorn.

At about noon they came down at last into the plain and eventually arrived at a village composed of two lines of houses strung out on either side of the road. The rain had stopped. The usual crowd of children began gathering about the car. They could be heard calling to one another in the distance as they ran towards the main street along parallel paths. The lorry drew up a few yards behind the car, and the workmen, leaping out over the tailgate one after another, began jumping up and down and waving their arms in order to get the circulation going again in their numbed limbs.

Passing villagers stopped to stare at these strangers. But they did not seem to be unaware of the reason for the visit. You could tell that from their faces. From the women’s especially. The general could recognize it easily now, that indecipherable expression in the villagers’ eyes. We remind them of the invasion, he thought.

Wherever we go, you can always tell what the war was like there just from their expressions. The fiercer the fighting was the more enigmatic their faces.

At the edge of the village, in a piece of fallow land, a considerable number of graves had been arranged in rows. The cemetery was surrounded by a low wall, breached in places. The men lying there are all ours, the general said to himself. And he drew his long waterproof cape closer about him to keep out the chill of the thought. A little ahead of him, standing quite motionless, the priest had the appearance of a black cross in a Mexican engraving. It’s easy to see how they came to get themselves surrounded, the general thought. Then they must have tried to escape by that bridge over the river there, and that’s where they will have got themselves wiped out. What idiot of an officer could have led them into a hornets’ nest like that? There’s nothing on the graves to tell us.

The Albanian expert began the customary formalities. Further on more graves appeared. They were all very much closer to the village and had red stars at their heads. The general recognized it immediately as a “martyrs’ graveyard,” as the natives of the country called the plots where the partisans were buried. In this one, seven of his countrymen had been buried beside the Albanians. Despite the spelling mistakes it was still possible to make out the names of the seven on the little metal labels with their red stars, together with their nationality and the date of their deaths - identical for all seven. On a stone plaque nearby was the inscription: “These foreign soldiers died heroes’ deaths, fighting beside Albanian partisans against the forces of the Blue Battalion, 17 March 1943.”

“That Blue Battalion again,” the general said as he walked between the rows of graves. “This is the second time we’ve come across Colonel Z.’s tracks. And according to our lists there should be two men of his battalion buried in this very village.”

“We must ask the villagers whether they know anything about the colonel,” the priest said.

While the visitors were busy entering their expenses, a number of men from the village had unobtrusively gathered along the graveyard boundary. Then a few women had appeared too. The children had even ventured further forward and were now standing there whispering in one another’s ears and shaking their little blond heads. All eyes were on the little group walking up and down between the rows of graves. An old woman carrying a keg on her back joined the villagers.

“Are they taking them away?” she asked in a low voice.

“Yes, yes, they’re taking them away,” several voices murmured in reply.

Her burden still on her back, the old woman surveyed the scene in the cemetery for a while with the other villagers. Then she walked forward several steps and spoke to the workmen:

“Make sure you tell them not to mix those seven up with the others. We mourned those with our own, according to the custom.”

The general and the priest turned round to look at the old woman, but she had already turned and was walking away. They watched her little keg swaying from side to side for a moment, then she was hidden by a bend in the road.

The villagers strung out along the edge of the cemetery were so still that it would have been easy not to notice their presence there at all. They all stood watching with the utmost concentration, determined not to miss a single movement made by these men walking up and down inside the cemetery, their coat collars turned up against the cold, apparently searching for something, though without success. “Work in both cemeteries will begin tomorrow,” the general said. “Today we shall try to find the two Blue Battalion soldiers and the crashed pilot.” Everyone in the village knew about the pilot. The wreckage of his aircraft had been strewn all through the little wood on the far side of the village. The pilot had been buried by the peasants themselves, near his plane. There was hardly any sign of the grave left now, except for a big stone that presumably marked its head. As for the plane, there was nothing left of that but a pile of rusty metal. One of the villagers told them how they had gradually stripped it of all the items that could be of any use to them, from the tyres and other rubber components - burnt during the war in place of candles - to the heavier metal parts, which had been put to innumerable different uses.